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Aldous Huxley: When to Be Brave and New Is Not Enough

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International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science Vol. 8 No. 10 October 2020 Aldous Huxley: When to Be Brave and New Is not Enough Khawla Dwikat1 and Prof. Samira al-Khawaldeh2 1The University of Jordan Email: [email protected] 2The University of Jordan Email: [email protected] Corresponding Author: Prof. Samira al-Khawaldeh P.O.Box 961651 Sports City, Amman, 111 96 Jordan Email: [email protected] / [email protected] Published: 31 October 2020 Copyright © Dwikat et al. Cite this article: Dwikat, K. & Al-Khawaldeh, S. (2020). Aldous Huxley: When to Be Brave and New Is not Enough. International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science, 8(10), 7-20. 7 International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science ISSN: 2307-924X www.ijlass.org Abstract As a modernist self-exiled intellectual, Huxley composes dystopian Sci-Fi Brave New World (1932), a novel that sketches in a Juvenalian mode a gruesome portrait of the future to satirize the present of modern Western civilization. Written during a period of unparalleled instability in the Western world, the novel comes as a prophecy of a future where man‟s final purpose of life becomes irrelevant; where violence, power, science, progress and technology are forces that rule, manipulate and distract the human race; the race that has already lost touch with its “perennial self” and the unitive knowledge of the “Divine Ground of all being”. This article aims at reading Huxley‟s novel via the lens of his philosophical writings mainly, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), and to present Huxley as the intellectual who advocates the necessity of bridging the gap between science and religio-philosophy. Keywords: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Perennial philosophy, religio-philosophy, satirical Sci-Fi, criticism of science Introduction Aldous Huxley (1894-19630) occupies the unique position of not only as a literary author but also that of the scientist, socio-cultural critic, satirist as well as a Perennial philosopher. Having lived a life of self-exile, first in Italy, then in the United States of America, Huxley seems to have given himself the chance to be detached from his familiar environment so as to see things from a distance and perhaps from a different perspective. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) Huxley applies satire in the sense Northrop Frye (1957) designates: “[S]atire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured” (p. 223). He employs satire to prophecy the ultimate physical and spiritual destruction that awaits humanity as a consequence to the blind worship of power, progress, and science. The novel translates his anxieties regarding humanity‟s ultimate pursuit of such temptations and its total lack of any awareness of its soul and spiritual needs. What makes a world “brave and new”? Brave New World takes place at the imaginary Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre in the year 632 A.F. (after Henry Ford, father of mass-production and consumerism in the real world, as well as the worshiped god in Huxley‟s Brave New World). The novel starts at a new moment in history that has nothing to do with any preceding history, philosophy or religion. It begins at a moment on a calendar based on the birth and death of Henry Ford whose famous statement is “History is more or less bunk” (Sawyer, 2015, p. 80). Hence, the novel pictures a whole new mass-produced world that is moving inside an unprecedented enhanced factory where ninety-six human beings are manufactured from one specific fertilized egg and habituated to their planned future lives. A decanted race and a world society, which consists of five biologically manipulated genetic castes, the “Alphas”, the “Betas”, the “Gammas”, the “Deltas” and the “Epsilons”, who are all Bokanovskily fashioned, “physio-chemically equal” and assigned to their proper place in the social and economic hierarchy. They have been moving “through the caste system as a fish through water” (Huxley, 1932, pp. 56-61). From the moment of their decanting up until their death, they are contrived, mobilized and subjected to mind control and brainwashing through hypnopedia, electric shocks, sexual promiscuity, mandatory contraceptives, sterilization, 8 International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science Vol. 8 No. 10 October 2020 euthanasia, in addition to the systematic dosages of the drug soma. A system of eugenics is fantastically functioning “to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers” (Huxley, 1932, p. xiv). Ten World Controllers are running the Brave World to maintain its stability and the conformity of its custom-tailored populace. In this Brave World, nothing is running naturally; everything is systematical, accurately planned, and totally mechanical; there is no room left for human sentiments. It is a world society manufactured by science and technology where the State is commanding and controlling all individual practices and private experiencing as well as directing them into politically monitored societal junctures. When it comes to social events and religious “orgy- porgies”, the Worlders are also orchestrated to glorify and thank “Lord Ford” as well as to traverse the realm of utter pleasure and contentment through the aid of psychedelics like soma. All possible anxieties are alleviated, and all private activities are regularly reported as well as aired on the Brave World “Hourly Radio”. All genetic castes are programmed to be content with their assigned position, pleased with being members of their own manufactured caste and at ease with the fact that they are mechanically designed to die abruptly and gently at the age of sixty where no public hassle or mourning over the dead is permissible. Death appears to be calculated, bureaucratic, and void of poignancy. Besides, in order to maintain both the stability of the society and the conformity of the five castes, the World Controllers grasp the necessity of maintaining the ideal number for the Brave New World population via considerate control of births and deaths. They deprived nature from its natural function in matters of life and death. Procreation and State‟s population are maintained to be under the absolute monitoring and jurisdiction of the State Controllers and their fellow eugenics and specialists to ensure the State‟s permanency and durability. The minds of the State Controllers are voiced by Huxley (1958) in his Brave New World Revisited as he speaks of the Brave World Controllers‟ fears of overpopulation which might lead “to economic insecurity and social unrest… unrest and insecurity lead to more control by central governments and an increase of their power…this increased power will probably be exercised in a dictatorial fashion” (p. 11). Along with maintaining the ideal number of population other precautions have been enacted to maintain not only the physical but also the psychological stability of the Brave New Worlders. Such as banning philosophical, literary and religious books and keeping them “locked up in the safe” (Huxley, 1932, p. 192). The State Controllers forbid the inhabitants from reading books because they know that books might generate consciousness of threatening concepts such as, liberty, nobility, individuality, chastity, family, and humanity. Critics assert that in this novel, Huxley depicts a society where sexual permissiveness, technological development, selective breeding and the debasement of popular culture are carried to the limit, creating a world of insipid, conformist mediocrity” (Batra, 2008, pp. 18-19). The five castes are physically and psychologically acclimatized to despise nature as well; for nature and books are two factors that could guide them through to discover something beyond their material existence such as their “perennial self”; or could trigger a flame that might lead them to discover their “Divine Reality”. Accordingly, Pavlovian conditioning techniques are employed by the Controllers as means for governing the citizens psychologically after manipulating them biologically. Starting from the moment when the embryos are clutched from the incubators, psychological experiments are conducted for creating inside the hatched babies instinctive animosity toward books and flowers, knowledge and nature. In the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Room and in the Social Predestination Room human behaviors are controlled through a stimulus-response procedure. The core drive behind enacting 9 International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science ISSN: 2307-924X www.ijlass.org such procedure is to stimulate fear and distress inside the Worlders‟ mind and soul. The Controllers believe both books and nature might instigate instability and “instability means the end of civilization” (Huxley, 1932, p. 194). They recognize the fact that “Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing” (Huxley, 1945, p. vii). This knowledge is what must be biotechnologically observed and mechanically induced in order to maintain the State‟s well-being. While composing this narrative, Huxley has been following the steps of the eighteenth- century writers where he uses Juvenalian and sometimes Horatian satires to comment on the unimaginable horrors of the war as well as to mock the misuse of science and technology by world powers who are “greedy for profit and glory…conservative [nationalistic radicals] determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern” (Huxley, 1932, p. xi). Harold Bloom (2004) sees the novel as “a vision of T. S. Eliot‟s Waste Land, of a world without authentic belief and spiritual values” (p. 8). When science collaborates with tyranny Huxley has been worried that those conservative nationalistic power hunters “could dominate people by social, educational, pharmaceutical arrangements…iron them into a kind of uniformity, if [they] were able to manipulate their genetic background…if [they] had a government sufficiently unscrupulous [they] could do these things without any doubt” (qtd in Bedford, 2002, p.
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